Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 13, 2012 @01:18PM
from the too-hard dept.

zacharye writes "In the five years since Apple launched the iPhone, the popular device has gone from a malicious hacker's dream to law enforcement's worst nightmare. As recounted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review blog, a Justice Department official recently took the stage at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C. and told attendees that the beefed up security in iOS is now so good that it has become a nightmare for law enforcement."

So, the "remote control" is uncrackable? iCloud and Siri and "location awareness" with GSM, WiFi and GPS make the security of the actual device nearly an orthoganal proposition to any enforceable protection for the user or data.

When this is so clearly a form of misdirection, I can't help but wonder the purpose of a DOJ statement like his being made public. Which perception and behaviour are they trying to influence, and by whom?

Okay, can't watch the youtube video(blocked due to limited bandwidth here), but it let me onto the infowars site.

750M rounds is 2.5 rounds per person in the USA, yes. However: Scare tactics are being used.

First, it's for training ammunition - my training/qualification for the year is at well over 500 rounds between pistol and rifle(~half each). I'm not DHS, but it should be a clue as to how many rounds it takes to train&qualify somebody. It's often an annual requirement.

Second - it's a 'purchase UP TO' order, up to 70M rounds/year, between all winning parties, for a 5 year contract. NOT 'planning to buy 750M rounds of ammo'. Going by the contract, that's a MAX of 350M. The minimum order in a year is 1 lot of 1k rounds. In these sorts of contracts they list the maximum possible they expect for each item - for example, a big purchase of.40S&W handguns, a shift to.357 Sig, whatever..223 is well represented, though I wonder that they aren't shooting NATO 5.56 spec rifles(the difference is about a human hair; doesn't matter much in training I guess). Going by my figure, a max order of 70M rounds would let you dual-qualify ~140k people. Office types trained 'just in case' would use a bit less ammo, SWAT types far more. A quick search shows 160k [syr.edu] employees in DHS. Or maybe it's 188k employees AND 200k contractors [fcw.com]. Whatever. I doubt they're going to be qualifying EVERYONE anytime soon, and probably don't plan to short of some crazy doomsday scenarios.

Third - "including 357 mag rounds that are able to penetrate walls." - just about ANY handgun self defense caliber is fully capable of penetrating a wall while remaining potentially lethal. It's a simple fact that a human body, which self defense rounds generally have to be able to completely penetrate to be considered effective, is more difficult to penetrate than 2 sheets of drywall. You want to go back to yea old days - when the.357 was developed, the standard was actually penetrating a car windscreen with a maximum deflection such that you'd still hit the driver. 9mm, btw, is 'normally' powerful enough for this, though you might need 2 shots(not as big of a deal for a semi), but this was back when we were still issuing revolvers to police. While we're at it, the contract also lists rifle calibers -.223,.30-06, and.308; all far more powerful than.357.

I can't help but wonder the purpose of a DOJ statement like his being made public.

It was a higher-up in the DoJ (specifically, Ovie Carroll) discussing challenges in digital forensics (at a conference on digital forensics). It was a brief mention in a larger talk and a fact that does not surprise anyone in the field. It's well-known that pulling data off of an iPhone can be a real pain in the ass. (IMO, I would consider Android worse, as there is not yet a reliable technique that can pull data off of an unrooted phone without modifying the phone's data, and data modification -- even when justified and documented -- is a big problem in some jurisdictions.)

It's misdirection to misdirect you from the misdirected misdirect, and time passes more slowly at each level of misdirection until you spend a lifetime misdirected into Limbo! THAT'S WHEN THEY GET YOU! #theyareouttogetyou

Basically, Apple has the ability to decrypt the data, and all the government needs is a court order to force them to do so. At the same time government officials are deploring their ability to access the data. Three possibilities that I see:

1. The government is attempting to deceive people into storing data where government officials can access it with a court order.

2. Some government officials do not have a problem admitting that they would love to access personal data without a court order, i.e. without probable cause.

3. Some government officials do not mind to supplement their income by advertising for Apple.

I frankly would have no problem with 1), would not be surprised by 3) but suspect the answer is 2)

An Apple fanboy writes an article praising the iphone using out of context quotes from the CEO of Paraben (not the DoJ) saying there have been cases where Paraben couldn't defeat iPhone encryption and a a DoJ official talking about hard drives (not the iPhone) saying that "if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data" (which isn't true, btw). Then a second fanboy reads said article and translates it to "iPhone is the DOJ's worst nightmare" and submits it to Slashdot where samzenpus demonstrates the usual lack of even the barest hint off fact-checking and gives us a headline like this one.

I used to think slashdot was supposed to spare you from the usual pointless waffle that fills tech mags because the journalists were scraping the bottom of the barrel for something to write about. Unfortunately...

FYI, this is the source of the summary quotes (adhoc as they are) and also addresses other questions regarding device security as opposed to iCloud security which has nothing to do with the linked articles.

"I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you're done," Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. "When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data."

At the heart of Apple's security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. After more than a decade of exhaustive analysis, AES is widely regarded as unbreakable. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment on this story. But the AES key in each iPad or iPhone "is unique to each device and is not recorded by Apple or any of its suppliers," the company said in a security-related white paper. "Burning these keys into the silicon prevents them from being tampered with or bypassed, and guarantees that they can be access only by the AES engine."

It also notes the key here, that while the device is powered on, it is still possible to obtain the key from memory, but once the device is turned off, the key is lost. It also notes that the decryption key itself is encrypted by the device pin, meaning an easy pin is an easily decrypted device. This is true for any mobile device, and a good reason to enable a strong ping instead of the default 4 char code seen on most devices.

What I found curious about the article is that they didn't emphasize this point. Video's of police decrypting a device due to a weak 4 pin character lock within a matter of seconds are available for any number of devices. I am curious how much additional computing power is needed to decrypt a device for each character added to the unlock sequence.

The iPhone always supported a PIN lock, but the PIN wasn't a deterrent to a serious attacker until the iPhone 3GS. Because those early phones didn't use their hardware to perform encryption, a skilled investigator could hack into the phone, dump its flash memory, and directly access the phone's address book, e-mail messages, and other information. But now, with Apple's more sophisticated approach to encryption, investigators who want to examine data on a phone have to

Given their policies regarding a number of things which are dinosaur-era, we don't have an answer to whether or not they will give it away or not. I don't know that an official statement has ever been made by apple. The question is - do you want to trust that information with apple? Specifically: 100% uncertainty? That's not a "apple is evil, apple is not evil".

Not true. It's absolutely fine to store your data on someone else's server as long as it's encrypted, you have the key and they don't. For example, using tarsnap [tarsnap.com] for backups should not be a problem, because the data is encrypted on the client and uploaded. Someone I know just submitted a PhD thesis on storing data securely on untrusted servers (well, a bit more than just that) and it's quite possible. That doesn't solve the reliability issue, of course, you still have to trust the remote site to stay in business, and to have adequate redundancy and backups. Even that can be addressed by sending your data to multiple providers.

OF COURSE they have a key. Any cloud-based data you can access through a web browser requires as much - whether it's with Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, Google...

And per one of your links, right after they say "of course Apple has a decryption key":

Still, vice president of products for cloud security firm Echoworx, Robby Gulri, noted that Apple is following best practices used throughout the industry. "Apple has taken the right steps to protect users' data and privacy as far as a widely public service like iCloud goes," he told Ars. "For example, data is transmitted using SSL, data is encrypted on disk using 128-bit keys, and Apple has stopped letting developers use individual UDIDs."

TFA and TFS should be modded +5 Funny.
One suspects that there are back doors all over the iPhone, in addition to the various apps that have access to remarkable amounts of stored material and regularly send it home (or elsewhere). Otherwise its alleged impenetrability would hardly be promoted by law enforcement. It's like Brer Rabbit pleading "please don't throw me in the briar patch".

This is purely anecdotal, but... I was recently on a flight next to a highway patrolman flying back from a conference for computer detectives (my words, not his; I don't remember what the actual job title was). He showed me the modified Ubuntu distro DVD they were passing out - "Look, it has a password cracker!" "Is that John the Ripper?" "You've heard of that?!?" - and we had a pretty nice chat.

During the conversation, I mentioned that iPhones are encrypted now. I asked, "OK, hypothetically, suppose I'm a mafia drug dealer and you get my encrypted cell phone. How screwed am I?" He said that they'd get a subpoena for my house, show up with a search warrant, and read the backup off my Mac's hard drive, "and then we run this app [opens it to show it to me] and have full access to all your data!" I told him that was pretty impressive, "but... what if I turn on FileVault and encrypt my whole hard drive?" He looked like I'd kicked his puppy and said that most criminals aren't smart enough to do that, but in that case, yeah, there was nothing he could do.

Feel free to take that with a grain of salt, but I had a detective tell me - in an unguarded two-geeks-talking moment with no apparent motive or visible sign of deceit - that the only way they could recover an encrypted iPhone's contents was through examining the unencrypted backup from an unencrypted hard drive. Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.

Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.

Without talking about bad implementation (e.g., weak passwords) or side channel attacks (keystroke loggers and the like) it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms. Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this) it would be far too valuable to waste on something as mundane as a criminal prosecution. National Security concerns trump the incarceration of child molesters, drug dealers, murderers, and other common criminals.

Far more interesting than the technical aspect will be the evolution of 5th amendment case law as it relates to encryption. There is no definitive legal precedent in the United States as to whether or not you can be compelled to disclose an encryption password. There have been a few cases that have danced around the edge of this question, but none have directly addressed it, nor have they made it to SCOTUS.

Exactly. He told me, basically, that the main (only?) side channel attack was getting the unencrypted backup. And yeah, I strongly suspect that if the NSA had the ability to crack AES, it would only be used for situations that you and I would never hear about. The instant it came out in even the most important of public trials, everyone would stop relying on AES about 30 seconds later.

Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this)

I don't personally count as such a math geek, but I know some who do, and the consensus is that, no, the NSA does not. Academic cryptographers who regularly collaborate with NSA cryptographers have the general impression that while it's likely that the NSA knows a number of tricks that academic cryptographers don't, that in many areas the NSA is learning a great deal from published work. In other words, the NSA may still be ahead, but not by that much.

OT, but since song of the south was *banned* by disney, you could only get a copy if you went to where pirates hang out.

it was a great classic movie but disney capitulated to pressure (their own, in fact!) and banned the film.

uncle remus is not fit for modern audiences. it 'offends their sensibilities'. or something like that.

oh, btw, FUCK DISNEY.

Wrong, american audiences are offended. The rest of world is not offended by this B-series film.And frankly speaking, if Song of the South is banned, then they should also ban Gone with the Wind and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Stupid country, unable to cope rationally with your past.

Wrong, american audiences are offended. The rest of world is not offended by this B-series film.
And frankly speaking, if Song of the South is banned, then they should also ban Gone with the Wind and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Stupid country, unable to cope rationally with your past.

Amen!

In the US, this is another example of political correctness gone overboard.

What the old saying about people not learning from mistakes in the past are bound to repeat them in the future?

Then again...look at Germany, banning most anything Nazi connected....I believe similar type bans happen in other EU countries too?

But seriously....this is a part of US history, and should not be suppressed. I remember seeing old Bugs Bunny cartoons...people got blown up into 'blackface'....if they even show these episodes on tv, these parts are usually edited...

Why? This is part of history, and people should know what attitudes were publicly held and presented to see how much we've changed over the years.

Why? This is part of history, and people should know what attitudes were publicly held and presented to see how much we've changed over the years.

We haven't changed over the years. Those attitudes are still common, but they are no longer publicized. So, by self-censoring itself in public, Disney is accurately reflecting racial attitudes in American society.

The problem is that those shows were made for children, and broadcasting them now means that some number of children, especially younger children, are going to see them (probably over and over, if the parents DVR them). And the last thing we should be doing is broadcasting cartoons with racist jokes in them to those children.

You know...myself and anyone my age..grew up with those cartoons...and somehow...we're not all damaged....why would todays kids be any different...are they more stupid now and need to

I was at this conference, the running joke was "If it's encrypted, forget about it!" Everyone knows this. FDE and utilities like TrueCrypt will always prevent data recovery, save for the human factor of giving up the password.

Also at the conference was the strong difference between American and British/Australian law. In the U.S., the 5th Amendment prevents someone from being required to turn over their password. The Brits and Aussies do not have this problem, as the 5th amendment doesn't exist for them.

In the U.S., the 5th Amendment prevents someone from being required to turn over their password.

This is still unsettled. The 11th Circuit Court [wired.com] has ruled that passwords are protected under the 5th amendment. However the 10th Circuit [huffingtonpost.com] has chosen not to intervene in a lower court decision that forced a woman to decrypt her laptop.

This is going to have to go to the Supreme Court eventually, and I think you can guess how the fascist majority of justices will decide.

So.... if you really *DID* forget the password, you could be looking at spending the rest of your life in prison, even if you never did anything wrong... simply because somebody thought you were guilty, and you had a faulty memory?

In civil contempt cases there is no principle of proportionality. In Chadwick v. Janecka (3d Cir. 2002), a U.S. court of appeals held that H. Beatty Chadwick could be held indefinitely under federal law, for his failure to produce US$ 2.5 mill. as state court ordered in a civil trial. Chadwick had been imprisoned for nine years at that time and continued to be held in prison until 2009, when a state court set him free after 14 years, making his imprisonment the longest on a contempt charge to date.

And all their non-administrative work has been contracted out years ago due to the small government initiative. So while folks (consultants) working at one or another of the facilities can be quite computer literate, the actual government employees might not be.

Honestly, this seems like a way to trick dumb criminals into thinking their information is secure just because they use an iPhone. If this were truly the case, and the DOJ does really have problems in dealing with iOS devices, I'd expect them to remain tight lipped about it.

Didn't stop them from hitting Padilla or Manning with metaphorical wrenches. A couple more direct examples: reporters [wikipedia.org] jailed (or threatened [nytimes.com] with jail) for not revealing their sources.

STAHL: If someoneâ(TM)s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person â" if you listen to the expression âoecruel and unusual punishment,â doesnâ(TM)t that apply?

SCALIA: No. To the contrary. You think â" Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I donâ(TM)t think so.

STAHL: Well I think if youâ(TM)re in custody, and you have a policeman whoâ(TM)s taken you into custodyâ"

SCALIA: And you say heâ(TM)s punishing you? Whatâ(TM)s he punishing you for? â¦ When heâ(TM)s hurting you in order to get information from you, you wouldnâ(TM)t say heâ(TM)s punishing you. What is he punishing you for?

Sadly the answer to that is so bloody obvious that it strains disbelief that Scalia wouldn't know it before he asked the question.

Quite simply, he's punishing you for not telling him what he wants to hear. That's all torture is good for anyway. If you torture someone long enough, they'll eventually figure out what you want to hear and start singing that tune like a canary. Note: What you want to hear has little, if anything, to do with the truth (except, perhaps, by coincid

5 minutes ago I knew nothing of Apples full disk encryption. Now I find an article that states:

The release of the iPhone 3GS (and later iPod Touch 3rd Generation) brought hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) to the iPhone. This was designed to accomplish one thing: instantaneous remote wipe. While the iPhone 3G had to overwrite every bit in flash memory (sometimes taking several hours), disk wiping on the 3GS worked by simply erasing the 256-bit AES key used to encrypt the data.

Unfortunately, disk encryption on the iPhone did little beyond enabling remote wipe. Mobile forensicator Jonathan Zdziarski found that the iPhone OS automatically decrypts data when a request for data is made, effectively making the encryption worthless for protecting data.

So I'd say I'm just VERY skeptical that the DOJ can't crack something that wasn't really designed with any security in mind in the first place. Either that, or the DOJ has nobody with any skills whatsoever.

And you haven't exactly disputed the article either. Just because it's 2 years old doesn't mean it's not accurate.

I have several IOS devices, and the only "password" you can put into it is the simple 4 character unlock code. You should certainly know that all encryption is based on keeping something secret that's very difficult to guess. If the only secret you're keeping is a 4 digit key, you're completely hosed to brute force attacks.

"Hooh, boy, that YouTube is soooo secure, a person could sign up for an account using their real name and home address, then post videos of them committing crimes online and law enforcement would never ever be able to track them! Honest!"

"You know where the safest place to hide stuff is? Underneath the welcome mat at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC. Really! We did a study and figured out that once that mat is pushed down on top of something, whether it's drugs, cash or big file folders full of industrial secrets, there's NO way that any one can get into it."

"My biggest nightmare is someone committing a crime, then emailing a detailed confession to ovie.carroll@usdoj.gov. Once something gets into those email tubes it's IMPOSSIBLE to get it back out and figure out what happened. Really. You can trust me. I'm with the government."

Can somebody explain how if the iPhone is so uncrackable/breakable that Apple can still export it? I seem to recall some kind of PGP problem where exporting something that was too secure was a violation of US laws. Or maybe I'm mixing reality with a bad Nicholas Cage movie, which is entirely possible.

Unlike Android (when enabled), it doesn't prompt for the key before booting the OS, so it's only partly encrypted. Yes the OS is mounted read only on iOS (as on Android by default) jailbreaking changes this, as does rooting, but you can't if it's fully encrypted

There are companies selling suites of forensics tools that blow thur any iphone security in a heart beat.Not to mention that every hacker can get into a stolen phone with any number of widely published tricks.

Wrong.It uses full disk encryption. However, that can be circumvented quite easily with a jailbreak (if one exists).

However, there is a second encryption system. This system derives the keys from your passcode and a key that is stored within a secure element on the iPhone. Thus, you need to know the Passcode of the iPhone in order to decrypt those files. Since, the key derivation function is tied to the passcode and the key within the secure element you cannot offload the brute-force attack to external machines, you need to do it on the iPhone. This means that a brute-force attack on a 4-digit PIN takes about 20 minutes (ok, that's not much), but when you consider complex PINs with 5 or more characters you are soon at 50 days (don't have the exact numbers in my mind right now, but there is a good presentation on that).

Downturn: You must rely on the app developer to chose the right protection class for the files. If he doesn't then you are down to the rather insecure full-disk-encryption, and you need to chose a longer Passcode...

This means that a brute-force attack on a 4-digit PIN takes about 20 minutes (ok, that's not much), but when you consider complex PINs with 5 or more characters you are soon at 50 days (don't have the exact numbers in my mind right now, but there is a good presentation on that).

Er, no. It means you make a copy of the flash storage, and brute-force it on a "real" computer in a matter of milliseconds.

That's because the password-protected encryption doesn't encrypt the whole disk. It encrypts individual files. There is a full-disk encryption key, but its purpose is to make wiping the device a single block write operation (overwrite the key) instead of a complete wipe of tens of gigabytes.

According to TFA, encryption and decryption is now available and built in in the hardware even. So it's become computationally cheap. The AES key is also burned in silicon, making it impossible to get to.

But as usual the weakest link is the user's password, in this case a PIN. A typical 4-digit PIN can be cracked (using special software to prevent phone from wiping itself after ten failed attempts) in a matter of minutes; one needs an 8-digit PIN to be reasonably secure (average 15 years for a brute-force attack).

As I have commented above, this is only the case when you have a passcode enabled. And your files are not encrypted in backups, either. Plus when your phone is unlocked, any exploit that allows you to leave the sandbox would let you access any encrypted files. This means that if that one company still has the software that breaks the iPhone's passcode by using a USB bruteforce (bypassing the lock screen's security), you're out of luck!